The workload of electronic devices or hardware units can be used to analyze the performance of the electronic devices or hardware units. If it is determined that the workload is low, the electronic device rarely executes its functionality and is mainly in an idle state, while if the workload is high, the electronic device mainly executes its functionality and is rarely in an idle state. According to the workload, functionality can be removed or added to accelerate or to slow the execution down. The workload of an electronic device can for example be defined as part of the total time of observation, in which the hardware or the electronic device executes some of its functionality. For processing devices like microprocessors, the workload corresponds to a number of clock cycles, during which instructions are executed. The workload may be expressed in percent. The workload may also be calculated based on a ratio of the execution time and the total time. The workload is typically determined by counting the total number of clock cycles within the observation and counting the clock cycles during which the electronic device performs an operation. By looking at inputs of an electronic device or a hardware unit, it can be detected whether an operation is executed. Furthermore, the detection of an operation can be performed based on the presence of any pending data or comments, or by inspecting the internal behavior of the unit to determine Data flows within the unit. Sometimes, the hardware unit may also compute the workload itself and output the result thereof.
However, it can be difficult to compute a workload of an internal behavior of a hardware block. Furthermore, it can be difficult to determine external communications of the hardware block as these communication as well as internal behavior has to be monitored and analyzed to determine the operation time and the idle time of the hardware unit. However, it should be noted that analyzing a hardware unit requires extra functional blocks which need to be incorporated into the system which may further increase the size of the system in terms of higher frequencies for processors or an additional hardware infrastructure.